Thanks for the replies, very useful information.
Its been running for about 12hours straight again now and with about 50% progress it’s still ok (i hope writing that hasn’t jinxed it!).
Im not sure how i would go about trying to narrow down a hardware issue as there is nothing obvious as far as i can see at the moment. The processors are xeons, and aren’t overclocked or anything like that so should be happy running full tilt 24/7. and the machine is a dell precision r5500 workstation so the rest of it should be ok with that too - even if it’s got some years under it;s belt. But it could as well be something more to do with windows and how thats working with the hardware, but as someone thats come across from the mac world specifically for CR i don’t know all that much about the OS. At any rate… it seems to be coping in this attempt, so fingers crossed we’ll get to the end this time.
thanks again.